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272 the best of jeffrey ford

273

Everyone remembers where they were when they first heard that Queen Josette had died. I was standing in twilight on

that cliff known as the Cold Shoulder, fly-fishing for bats. Beneath me, the lights of the palace shone with a soft glow that dissolved decrepitude into beauty, and a breeze was blowing in from the south, carrying with it the remnants of a storm at sea. I had just caught a glimpse of a star, streaking down behind the distant mountains, when there was a tug at my line followed hard by a cry that came, like the shout of the earth, up from the palace. I heard it first in my chest. Words would have failed to convince me of the fact, but that desperate scream told me plainly she was dead.

Josette had been an orphan left at the palace gates by a troupe of wandering actors. She arrived at a point in her life between child-hood and maturity, wondrously lithe and athletic with green eyes and her dark hair cut like a boy’s. I suspect she had been abandoned in hopes that her beauty and intelligence might work to make her a better life than one found on the road. This

At Reparata

Call me a superstitious fool if you like, I might very well deserve the appellation. As it turned out, I never finished the promised story, and the publisher of the collection, Golden Gryphon Press, retracted their offer to do the book. Of all the ironies, they filled my spot on their list with a collection by Ford. He even wrote, especially for it, a story entitled “Bright Morning,” making no attempt to disguise his swiping of Kafka’s material. One of the early, prepublication critics of the book wrote in a scathing review, “Ford is Kafka’s monkey.” Nothing could have interested me less. I returned to my teaching job. I spent time with my family. I slept at night with no frightening visits from old or thin demons. In the mornings I woke to the beauty of the sun.

A year later, after retiring from my brief career as a fantasy writer, I read that Ford, two weeks prior to the publication of his collection, had given a reading from his manuscript of “Bright Morning” at one of the conventions (I believe in Massachusetts). According to the article, which appeared in a reputable newspaper, after receiving a modest round of applause from the six or seven people in attendance, he stepped out into the bright morning and quietly evaporated, the pages scattering on the wind like frightened ghosts.

274 the best of jeffrey ford At Reparata 275

was back in the days when Ingess had just begun to build his new court from society’s castaways. Upon seeing her, he pronounced she was to be the Lady of the Mirrors, but we all knew that she would someday lose the title to that of Queen. The drama that brought her to this stately affair was ever the court’s favorite spectacle and topic of conversation.

Her hair grew long and entangled us all in her charm and inno-cence. Ingess married her on a cool day in late summer five years after her arrival, and the Overseer of Situations released a thousand but-terflies upon the signal of their kiss. We all loved her as a daughter, and the younger ones among us as a mother. She never put on airs or forced the power of her elevated position, understanding better than anyone the equanimity that was the soul of the Palace Reparata. Her kindness was the perfect match for Ingess’s comic generosity.

With her passing, His Royal, as he had insisted on being called, came apart like light in a prism. I sat four nights in succession with him in the gardens, smoking my pipe and listening to him weep into sunrise. The quantity of tears drained him of his good looks and left him a haggard wreck, like some old crone, albeit with shining, blond hair.

“See here, Ingess,” I told him but could go no further, the logic of his grief too persuasive.

He’d wave his hand at me and turn his face away.And so, the world he had managed to create with his pirate ances-

tor’s gold, his kingdom, suddenly lost its meaning. Before Josette had succumbed to the poison of a spider bite, Reparata was a place where a wandering beggar might be taken in at any time and made a Court Accountant or Thursday’s High Astronomer. Every member of the palace had a title bestowed upon them by His Royal. There was no want at Reparata, and this made it an oasis amidst the sea of disappointment and cruelty that we, each in his or her own way, had found the world to be.

Never before had a royal retinue been comprised of so many lowly worms. The Countess Frouch had been a prostitute known as Yams in the nearby seaside town of Gile. His Royal welcomed her warmly, without judgment, as he did Tendon Durst, a round, bespectacled lunatic who believed beyond a doubt that he was joined at a shared eye with a phantom twin. In a single day’s errant wandering, Durst had set out as a confirmed madman and ended the evening at the palace with a room of his own and a title of Philosopher General. We had never before seen someone speak simultaneously from both sides of the mouth, but that night he walked in his sleep and told us twice at once that he would never leave Reparata. We all shared his sentiment.

Even Ringlat, the highwayman, hiding from the law, performed his role of Bishop to the Crown righteously. Our lives were trans-formed by a position in society and whatever bizarre duties His Royal might dream up at his first encounter with us, standing before him at the palace gates, begging for a heel of bread or the eyes from that morning’s marsupial dish. Times were bad everywhere, but Ingess was so wealthy, and Reparata was so far removed from the rest of the world, no one who wandered there and had the courage to ask for something was sent away. We lived long bright days as in a book and then, with a fit of narcolepsy, the reader closed his eyes and fell asleep.

If we ever had intentions of fleecing His Royal, the time of his mourning was the perfect opportunity. Instead, we went about our jobs and titles with even greater dedication, taking turns keeping an eye on our melancholic leader. My full title was High and Mighty of Next Week. Ingess, beneath his eccentric sense of humor, must have known that it was the only position vague enough to tame my impulses. On my own, I, who had never done an honest day’s work in my life, created and performed a series of ritual tasks that gave definition to my importance at court. Gathering bats in order to

544 the best of jeffrey ford Story Notes 545

think the cover is based on the titular story, but instead it’s from “Bright Morning,” the original story in the collection, edited by Marty Halpern for Golden Gryphon Books, 2002. The piece was picked up for reprint by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly’s anthology, Feeling Very Strange, a great collection of stories they felt fit under the title of ‘slipstream’ (a term you don’t hear much these days). That anthology came out in 2006. Kessel and Kelly did another anthology in 2011, Kafkaesque, and asked to use the same story again. I was thrilled to be in both.

at reparata

I met Ellen Datlow at the World Fantasy Convention in Monterey, CA some time back through the misty years. She was with Kelly Link. We got to talking and Ellen told me to submit a story to her new online venture, Event Horizon. I knew of the site. She was pub-lishing some really good fiction and non-fiction there. So I sent her this story. I got word that she dug the story but she had edits. Did she ever. She really worked that story over. Many back and forths. I learned a lot. It was like a Clarion workshop solely for short fiction squashed into a few dozen emails. I can’t recall where the idea for the story came from except the first scene where the character fly fishes for bats off the edge of a cliff overlooking the palace. That came directly from Tales of the Alhambra by Washington Irving. Oh, and the drink, Princess Jang’s Tears, was an actual drink the bar-tender at the house of Yu concocted. At the time Lynn and I lived at the motel that restaurant was connected to. I was in there for a few beers one afternoon, and the guy made one. Yes, the tears fell like rain from a pale green sky.

the dreaming wind

This story appeared originally in Coyote Road: Trickster Tales. It was the third in an anthology series, Mythic Fiction, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling for Viking Juvenile. There were four volumes in all and each piece had a story header illustration by the great Charles Vess. I had a story in every volume of the series and was excited to write each one. I took these books as opportunities to write something ultimately lighter and more positive for young readers. Most of my stories tend toward the weird and dark, so this chance to do the opposite was welcome. It gave me a sense of freedom and play. I recall that the term “the dreaming wind” was a line in a song that came out of my ears late one night when I was writing. Back in the day, when I’d stay up late, til 3:00 a.m., in a writing daze, there came a point where I was really on auto-pilot. I’d lose all sense of time. Occasionally, I’d hear things, like my grandmother or one of my sisters call my name. My grandmother, though, had passed and my sisters both lived far away. Sometimes music would come out of my head, mostly without lyrics, but some-times with. One of the lines had something to do with the dreaming wind. The other effect that happened in these states was I would see smoke coming off the pages of a book or sifting out of the computer screen. Crazy, I know. I don’t write late at night anymore. I’m too old. My father-in-law, who was a cartoonist, and who for a long time worked late into the night as well, warned me, “As you get older, the night becomes a cruel mistress.” At about fifty-eight, I came to the conclusion he was right. In this story, I wanted to see if I could write a compelling story without a villain. After the book was published, Vess inquired if the writers wanted to purchase the original of his drawing for their particular story. The price was super reasonable, so I was able to acquire the drawing of the young woman whose hair has come to life and is grabbing plates and tossing them. It’s